Public reading Jennifer Scappettone and Ifor Duncan

On Wednesday, 21 May, the Network for Environmental Humanities and BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries are organizing a public presentation featuring Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago) and Ifor Duncan. This is the third session of the collaborative reading series The Florilegia (‘flower-gatherings’). The series features readings by international and local writers working at the intersection of language justice and climate justice through translation, translanguaging, and transmedial work.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts and is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (surrounding post-911 US, published by Litmus in 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (a tale of two landfills, one notorious and one unknown but ultratoxic, published by Atelos in 2016). Scappettone has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the Janiculum Hill to Michigan’s Quincy Copper Mine, and her verse has been installed at venues ranging from the Maison des Cultures in Brussels to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), and editor of Belladonna Elders Series: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna, 2009). She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi award for poetry in translation. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending modern contemporary communications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature. Following a term as Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel, she is currently curating a series of “floating workshops” devoted to the geopoetics of urban rivers.

The reading is free and open to the public. Light refreshments served.

For questions, reach out to the organizers: Mia You, m.m.you@uu.nl, and Adele Bardazzi, a.bardazzi@uu.nl .

No registration needed.